Review: ‘A Truck Full of Money’ and a Thirst to Put It to Good Use

Before the sensibility of Tracy Kidder’s new book clearly emerges, and before its subject, Paul English, becomes endearingly familiar, you may be tempted to put it down. The first few chapters of “A Truck Full of Money: One Man’s Quest to Recover From Great Success” have the sound of a glossy business-magazine hagiography — so much so that readers may wonder why the book isn’t blushing.

Decency? Generosity? Why, this man has them in spades. He’d need a whole wall of shelving to fit all that decency and generosity. And brains! Well, for those he’d need to sprout a second head.

It takes a while to realize that Mr. English, a founder of the travel website Kayak.com, actually is a sensitive, maddening, loopy sort of whiz. He really doesn’t care much about money, and he really does seem delighted to give it away. “Money is a yucky reason to switch jobs,” he wrote in a charming, touching email volley with a close friend.

But it’s a mistake for Mr. Kidder to strike such a gushing tone as he introduces us to this man. There’s been far too much slobbering over barons of the new economy in the last 15 years for readers to understand that this narrative may be slightly different.

Admirers of Mr. Kidder’s recent works, like “Strength in What Remains” (about a remarkable Burundian refugee) or “Mountains Beyond Mountains” (about the indefatigable Dr. Paul Farmer), may also wonder why Mr. Kidder alighted on Mr. English as his latest biographical subject, considering that he hardly meets the same standard of heroism or resilience. In an author’s note, Mr. Kidder explains that “A Truck Full of Money” is a kind of sequel to “The Soul of a New Machine” (1981), his Pulitzer Prize-winner about the race to build a next-generation minicomputer. Fair enough: The writer is returning to his roots.

But a book about a software guy and software culture in 2016 isn’t nearly as novel as a book about hardware guys and hardware culture in 1981, and Mr. Kidder is not in the same command of his material. He seems much more like a fellow who’s stepped off a cruise ship for an afternoon than like someone who’s spent many months inhabiting Mr. English’s world. (He doesn’t seem to realize, for instance, that excitable entrepreneurs often pitch banal ideas by using words like “awesome” and “disruptive.”) Nor did Mr. English, as smart as he is, revolutionize the way we use the internet. He’s a fellow who helped come up with an innovative way to compare travel options online and sold it for a ton of money to Priceline.

If Mr. Kidder was hoping for an airport business-book best seller, I don’t think this is it.

There is, however, an element of Mr. English’s story that’s quite striking, one that makes “A Truck Full of Money” feel very much like a Tracy Kidder book.

Image

Tracy Kidder CreditGabriel Amadeus Cooney

In his 20s, Mr. English was told he had bipolar disorder. For a long time, he kept his diagnosis a secret. But today, he is wonderfully open and courageous about it.

Many of Mr. Kidder’s subjects are coiled with enough energy to launch a missile, of course, but Mr. English has a psychiatric diagnosis to go with it. The questions Mr. Kidder raises — Are Mr. English’s manic spells responsible for his entrepreneurial boldness? Or does he succeed in spite of them? — are well worth probing, and Mr. Kidder’s portrayal of living with manic depression is as nuanced and intimate as a reader might ever expect to get. On a good day, Mr. English’s mind is gaily swarming with bumblebees. On a bad one, though, he’s “Gulliver imprisoned by the tiny Lilliputians, laid out on his back, tied to the ground with a web of tiny ropes.”

Many of the features of Mr. English’s biography fit a familiar pattern. He was a low-achieving student with a high-watt intelligence. He discovered computer programming in middle school and was instantly smitten; today, he thinks fluently in layers of code — “each hanging from the one above, like a Calder mobile” — and his brain is a regular popcorn maker of ideas. (Though some kernels never open: Among the domain names Mr. English purchased years ago was Snapcab, which predated Uber by five years. He never did a thing with it.)

The book traces Mr. English’s professional arc, from his beginnings as a coding virtuoso in a pioneering software company, Interleaf, to the founding of Kayak to his current project, Lola, an online travel service that allows customers to interact with actual humans through a smartphone app. Mr. English, born in 1963, had the good fortune to come of age at a time when analytical, oddball, extroverted introverts like himself had a lucrative, socially acceptable outlet for their talents, and his euphoric episodes oddly matched the country’s, which for a while went gaga over all things tech.

But the high-amplitude sine curve of manic depression has also complicated Mr. English’s life in all kinds of unforeseen ways.

When he’s “on fire” (his term), he grows irritable with the slow dial-up connection of other people’s brains. He exaggerates. He slurs his words. His ideas range from extremely creative to flat-out wackadoo. (One, which he partly fulfilled, was to create Blade, a business incubator by day and psychedelic disco by night. The disco part didn’t quite take off.) And he spends his money on the darnedest things: He once bid $500,000 on an abandoned lighthouse in Boston Harbor and instantly regretted it. Someone, thank heavens, bid more.

But one of the more admirable aspects of Mr. English’s character is his attitude toward money. He grew up without it, in a family of nine in South Boston. His modest roots could have made him jealously guard his millions with his life. But he quickly realized that giving them away — to the homeless in his native city, to the sick and dispossessed in Haiti — was a great form of therapy, which he’s self-aware enough to admit: “I knew that one way to get rid of any depression was to do something for somebody else.”

Over the years, Mr. English has tried a Lazy Susan of medications to subdue his highs and avert his lows. Many left him feeling listless and without affect. Being bipolar meant constantly weighing the merits of instability versus a denatured, drained sense of self.

Today, though, he’s on a regimen that agrees with him. “A Truck Full of Money” ends on a note of tranquillity — with Mr. English philosophical, the loose ends of his various projects, cockamamie or not, tied up in a bow. It all feels a bit arbitrary, much like the book itself. But you can’t help admiring Mr. English and cheering for him. We last see him as a registered Uber driver — for research. (The Boston Globe has written about this, too.) He drives his customers in a Tesla. It’s a reminder that most cabbies have stories to tell.